April 08, 2010

Luigi Lineri, El santuario dei sassi/The sanctuary of stones

Stones, stones, stones..... Luigi Lineri (1937) has been collecting them from younghood on, now for some forty years or more.

Life and works

Born in the small community of Albaro, Italy. Lineri lives in the nearby community of Zevio, in the neighbourhood of Verona.

Zevio is on the Adige river, that runs parallel with the Po river through northern Italy. On the banks of this Adige river Lineri likes to wander and collect stones.

Around 1970 he has begun arranging these stones according to characteristics they might have in common. Well, it's just a way of looking, but for example one could discover a face in a stone and combine all facial stones.

Lineri's passion for the stones has to do with the association he has through these stones with cultures from long ago, how these people lived, what there ideas were and their ways of looking at life, how they used stones....

Arranging the stones is done in associative and intuitive way, it is a creative, artistic, not a scientific enterprise.

Some groups of stones have been arranged in ziggurat-like piles.

The whole collection is displayed on the walls and floors of two rooms of the house and an adjacent barn.

In terms of collecting stones Lineri is a non-professional, the only people who do this kind of collecting by profession probably will be those archeologists who are unearthing flints from the neolitihical era.

Luigi Lineri is an artist, who is related to the art singulier group, that is active in southern france. He has been writing poetry, making paintings and doing ceramics. Most art singulier artists are self-taught.

* A movie entiteld Outsiders (2014) by Sara Pigozzo and Enrico Meneghelli portrays some people who have a close relation with the Adige river, among whom Luigi Lineri. Here is the trailer (Youtube, 2'24", uploaded oct 2014)

5 comments:

Incredible ! And does he sleep on a bed of stones too ? Must have a big house if he can give up two rooms for the stone collection... And I'll bet he listens to... the Rolling Stones... or Bob Dylan's famous old song which says, "Everybody must get stoned" ...

Hi Owen, that's very quick of you, just published the post maybe an hour ago...It's an incredible story, indeed. Stones have a special place in entertainment, like the "Rolling stones"in rock (!) music, "romancing the stone" in the movie world, Fred Flintstone in tv, may be more. I myself am very interested in megalithic sites: stone rows, stone circles, you name it....Associations galore...

In short

If you are looking for a specific art environment, best use the the indexes above, by which one can select by

- name of the artist, or by- country/region

About this blog

This blog is an inventory and documentary of outsider art environments in Europe.

It is about people who without relevant professional training, during many years and with a lot of passion transform their house/garden into a relatively large-scale artwork by embellishing it with decorations, paintings, mosaics, sculptures and/or structures, in general doing this outside of and disregarded by the world of professionals.